


the shuffle of crabs on the ocean floor

by mikkal



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: (can easily be convinced to continue tbh), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, BAMF Tifa Lockhart, Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Gen, Poor Cloud Strife, WIP, this is all there is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-14 08:31:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20597792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikkal/pseuds/mikkal
Summary: On the night Nibelheim burns, a single moment leads to Tifa making a decision that sets forth a different chain of events.When Hojo comes, only Cloud is there to take.





	the shuffle of crabs on the ocean floor

Zack doesn’t know what he’s feeling when he comes to.

A hand on his back, yeah, struggling to lift him up. Pain, of course, burning through his body. He hears a voice, a girl, that’s trying to be quiet but is obviously too used to being loud and assertive. A soft warmth radiating in front of him, teasing the scant mana he has left into rising up and curling around the wounds cut deep into his body.

He opens his eyes only a crack, then wider until the blurry form of Tifa Lockhart clears up. Her own eyes are shimmering with tears, a deep soulful brown he’s sure he’ll get smacked if he compliments them (especially now), and she holds a small orb of green Materia.

It’s pulsing in time with his heartbeat, he realizes. Zack takes it with a shaking hand. Cure. He’s never been good with identifying Materia but Cure he can recognize.

And like surging out from underwater, he can hear Miss. Lockhart whispering frantically, “I can’t use it. I can’t use it. Please, he’s going to kill Cloud.”

Oh Gods, does he hurt. He presses the Materia to the wound on his chest and forces his mana through until it comes out as magic. It feels funny. Easier, yet harder. The Cure is stronger than anything he’s managed before, that’s the easy part, but directing it to heal his wounds is like grappling with one of Scarlett’s experiments.

(“_just like that_,” he hears, soft and sweet pressed against his ear. he’ll never not know that voice.)

The Materia grows dark, spent until it recharges, and Zack feels like he still can’t move. Tifa shoves her arm fully under his shoulders, heaving him up with shaking strength. His vision clears even more, and he can see a bruise darkening on her temple, blood dried down her chin.

“Please,” she begs.

They stand together, Zack’s legs quaking under his weight, Tifa staggering under her own and his. He takes a step, and nearly hits the ground again. Instead, Tifa lowers them into an ungraceful heap, no closer to where they can hear the clash of swords and Sephiroth’s wicked taunts.

Before they can try again, they hear a shout—a scream, and a crack of glass. Then the soft squelch of the Buster sword impaling flesh.

Cloud. _Cloud_ staggers out of the reactor’s main room, sagging against the door frame, blood dripping from his chest, his stomach, smearing from his temple into his eyes. _His eyes_, which are distant with pain and loss, which, for a brief moment, Zack sees a shine of green before those eyes blink, Buster sword dropping from his grip with a clang, and they’re his pretty blue again. He looks down at them, unrecognizable in his blankness, and starts walking.

He doesn’t lift a foot for the first stair. His boot meets air and he fallsfalls_falls_ forward in slow motion, sliding face down the steps and coming to stop just before the last one. Blood leaves a gruesome streak behind him and the angle he lays causes it to pool on the step just below his face.

“_Cloud_!” Tifa cries, the desperation in her voice heartbreaking. Zack thinks back to their arrival to this tiny little village and Cloud’s reluctance to show his face to everyone, especially this girl he made a promise to so long ago. “Cloud Strife, answer me!”

Eyes half-lidded, skin pale beyond his natural pallor, hair stained red, Cloud doesn’t answer.

Distant footsteps do instead.

Surefooted and purposeful, they’re the sounds of men wearing heavy combat boots and then the crisper sounds of polished wingtips. They’re familiar in the sense that they’re the source of the worst kind of nightmares._ The Science Division_. Expected but unanticipated fear chokes Zack and he wheezes.

He shoves at Tifa with waning strength. “Get out of here,” he hisses. She hesitates, tearing her gaze from Cloud with great reluctance and looking to him. He knows he’s not much older than her, but she _looks_ _so young_. The footsteps get louder, panic roars in his ears. “Tifa, _please_.”

She glances to where they can hear voices now, something wavering in her expression. Then—Then it settles into determination, her jaw clenches, those soulful brown eyes harden and glint with anger. With renewed strength, Tifa stands. And takes Zack with her. Her arms are shaking and, when she starts walking, she can’t do it in a straight line.

He goes with her, because that’s all he can do, blinking in shock. “What’re you doing?” he asks breathlessly. Cloud lays there so still, so _death-like_, and here they are, moving away from him towards a metal cabinet in the corner. “Stop. _Stop_. What’re you _doing_?”

Tifa can’t carry both men at once. She can’t carry even only Cloud, because while it’s a struggle, Zack is staggering along with her. Cloud—alivealive_alive—_would be dead weight. Her eyes sting with tears that she can’t wipe away, so they just streak down her cheeks, clearing clean tracks through blood and dirt. The adrenaline coursing through her body is the only reason Zack’s weakened attempts to break free aren’t working.

This one, she can hide. She can hide him; she can hide herself. And when these people, the people that can make a SOLDIER First turn so pale and fearful, take their Cloud—because the dots connect and that’s the only conclusion she can think of. Well, they’re going to regret it so very much.

Because the two of them?

They’re going to get him back.

—

Professor Hojo takes pride in his intelligence and shrewd mind. He is the genius behind SOLDIER and the Jenova Project. Hollander may have had some inkling of intellect, but never quite used it in a way that deemed him worthy of Hojo’s consideration. _Pah_, Project G? Child’s play.

And don’t get him started on that farce Faremis.

So, standing in the Nibelheim Mako Reactor with his most prized, most successful experiment _gone_ and a mere trooper in its place? It boggles the mind.

If he were the type of man to rely on hope then the lack of body would be an indication that Sephiroth isn’t dead, but the blood—all that blood—is damning evidence.

Hojo stands over the body of the trooper and half listens to the Turks talk among themselves. Cloud Strife, his name is. A mere trooper too unstable to handle the effects of mako, too weak to handle the pressure, too quick to lash out for the discipline of the SOLDIER project. To defeat Sephiroth? Impossible.

But not impossible anymore.

There is supposed to be one more person here. Zack Fair—now there’s a worthy specimen. SOLDIER First even if his initial promotion to the highest ranking was a distraction from certain events. He would’ve made it eventually. Hojo would’ve been surprised still, but less so, if Zackary Fair was the proclaimed winner of a match between him and Sephiroth.

But Fair isn’t here. There are blood streaks leading out of the reactor. The village is on fire. Those who weren’t dead from Masamune, the Turks quickly and quietly took care of them, and then let the rest of the village burn.

He sighs. “Pack him up,” he orders the Turks. They bristle at being commanded by the likes of him, but they can’t argue. “I will see what’s so special about him in my lab. Perhaps he’ll make a worthy replacement.” _Doubtful_, he sneers, but perhaps instead he will work as part of a different experiment.

After all, you can’t have a Reunion when there’s only one of something.

—

Zangan finds them in the morning, stuffed in that little cabinet long cleared out by employees, wounds scabbed over, tears dry on their cheeks. He expects Tifa, that girl always had a spark of survivor in her, but the black-haired man is a surprise.

He’s almost too afraid to ask, but the name falls from him anyway. “Cloud?”

The man—First Class Fair, if he remembers correctly. Was he told a first name?—shakes his head and looks up, violet eyes shimmering with rage and despair. Tifa, though, trembles with her fury.

“They took him,” she hisses. She slams a fist into the side of the metal cabinet, it crumbles under her palm. She doesn’t wince though the leather of her gloves did nothing to protect her bones and there’s already bruises forming. “They fucking _took him_.”

Because predicting isn’t the same as knowing, as _seeing_ it happen.

“Do you know where?” Zangan asks.

He taught the two of them, before Cloud left to Midgar with dreams bigger than his head. While the other children of the village were content with picking up the mundane duties they would have the rest of their lives, Cloud and Tifa were not. Even more so, Cloud’s outcast status meant there really wasn’t anything else he could do but go out with his ma and search for natural Materia—a hobby, job, whatever that was quickly going out of style as Shinra manufactured increasingly unblemished Materia.

Zangan taught them for years on how to use their fists and their wits, attempted to teach them both to control their tempers with less than stellar results.

He’s had hundreds of students all over the planet. He’s never had children of his own. But looking at Tifa Lockhart swallow her grief and turn it into rage. But having the fear in the unknown for Cloud, how it roots deep in his heart.

Those two kids—_these_ two kids, are the closest things to his own he can claim.

Tifa snarls, expression twisting, and whirls around on the SOLDIER, advancing with such an air of threat, he actually takes a step back. “Do _you_ know where?” she demands, finger jabbing the center of his chest.

“Midgar,” Fair replies quickly. Exhaustion weighs heavily on his words, in his shoulders. His face and uniform are streaked with blood, his face unnaturally pale. “That’s the only place I can think of, back to Shinra. You heard Hojo, he wants to experiment on him.”

She nods sharply. “Then that’s where we’re going.” Fair opens his mouth, perhaps to agree, but Tifa quickly slash a hand in the air, cutting him off. “_No_, we’re going.”

“I wasn’t going to argue,” Fair snaps out, running a hand through his hair. His glove comes back tacky with blood and he grimaces. He sighs, shoulders slumping. “We need to think this through. We’re injured. I’m probably counted as a fugitive already. And what’re we gonna do once we hit Midgar? Tifa, we can’t just, just _storm_ Shinra Tower!”

“We’ll figure something out when we get there.”

He grabs her shoulders when she tries to turn away, leaving a streak of brown-red on her vest. Their eyes meet, glaring to hide their fear, anger and fury to hide their helplessness. “We have to come up with something _now_,” Fair says quietly. “I know Shinra. I know Hojo. Cloud will never forgive me if I let you go in half-cocked.”

Tifa bristled under his touch, but now she droops. She scrubs the back of her wrists over her eyes, though there’s no more tears to fall. She’s all cried out and all that’s left is this crumbled up ball of fear and self-loathing to ever think hiding was better than fighting. If only she’d been strong enough, then Cloud would’ve never been taken, and they wouldn’t be in this mess.

But no, she was too weak and too scared.

She sniffles once then angrily wipes her nose. “And he wouldn’t forgive me if something happened to you, especially because of my stubbornness.” A beat of silence, and then she’s laughing at his bewildered expression. It’s soft and tinged with sadness, but it’s a laugh and he smiles slightly in response to it, even if he’s still a little confused.

Nothing’s funny anymore, but she’ll take what she can.

—

There’s nowhere to go but north, up to Rocket Town. Nibelheim. Nibelheim is _gone_. And Tifa knew this was going to happen, she did, but when her home was burning around her, she’d kept this hope that maybe not everything would go up in flames.

But everything _did_ go up in flames. All that’s out there now is wet ash and the charred scent of burnt meat that makes her gag. When she tries to go home there’s no door, there’s no first floor. There’s not enough of her house to be considered a house anymore, let alone a home.

Her and Cloud may be the last Nibelheimers on the Planet. 

She tries anyway, for a few minutes, to just…believe something of hers is still there. Zack and Master Zangan politely turn away as she dirties her gloves and scrapes her knees as she digs through wood and torn cloth that had been too wet to burn. She finds her bō staff, tarnished but workable, and then the small Materia shard necklace Ma Strife gave her only last year for her birthday.

Zack doesn’t have a sword anymore. She solemnly hands him the bō staff and he takes it quietly, unable to meet her eyes.

So, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, they set off over the mountain. Their ruined village behind them, the sun rising in the distance. They’re streaked with blood and soot and dirt, Zack’s still moving wonky because of his injuries, Tifa’s limping. But with Zack the only one able to use Materia, they have to wait until his mana levels are back up to par and the Cure he used last night charges back up.

High up on the mountain ridge, heading towards a pass through two peaks, Tifa stops.

She looks out to the whole expanse of her village, takes in the bridge in the distance she once fell off of and Cloud got blamed for pushing her though it’d just been her being an idiot. Hidden in a crevice of a cliff is a natural mako pool Cloud almost drowned in when they were kids.

There’s the clearing Zangan held their lessons. There’s the pasture, empty now of any animals, where they learned to ride. Below her feet is Shinra Mansion and the reactor. In front of her is the woods once full of the Nibel wolves all the kids use to boast about killing one day, protect their village, their families.

A single night goes by and now there’s nothing to protect, no one to protect it.

Tifa turns away, back to where Zack waits with sad eyes and Zangan who can’t look himself, and she takes another step towards Rocket Town, fury in her nerves, guilt in her heart. Cloud doesn’t have time for her to grieve and mourn over a village that treated him like shit. He doesn’t have time for her to hesitate, for her to second guess herself.

She’s already failed him once. He can’t afford for her to do it again.


End file.
